Large diameter wire or cable is typically fabricated in spiral-wound coils weighing thousands of pounds. In order to reduce the wire coil into usable lengths, the wire coil is typically fed through a wire drawing machine which can reduce the diameter of the wire and feed the wire to a machine to cut the wire into suitable lengths.
A variety of machines therefore have been developed for drawing the wire from the coil and to a reducing machine, cutting machine, or the like. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,497,928, assigned to the present assignee, discloses a machine wherein a spool of wire is unwound to a wire straightening apparatus and then to a wire cutting apparatus. Each of the three aforementioned elements is disposed in linear fashion which therefore occupies a relatively large expanse of shop floor space in that the overall footprint of the machine is relatively long, although also relatively narrow.
Machines have therefore been developed which allow the wire to be pulled from the coil but which do so while occupying relatively little floor space in that the various elements are not placed on the shop floor in linear orientation. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,097,688, also assigned to the present assignee, discloses an in-line wire drawing machine wherein the wire coil is mounted on a turntable which itself is mounted directly on the main base of the wire drawing machine. A power-driven capstan is provided on the main base and below the turntable such that the rotation of the capstan will pull the wire from the coil. The wire is pulled downwardly from the coil which is mounted on top of the support and through a series of rollers around a fairly complex path, against the natural cast of the wire, in route to reaching the drawing machine. However, since the wire coil is mounted directly on top of the main base of the machine, the overall footprint of the machine is relatively small.
Still further machines have been developed which allow the wire coil to be mounted directly on the shop floor or on top of a base which itself is mounted directly on the shop floor to thereby avoid the aforementioned problem of mounting the large diameter wire coil on top of the capstan base. However, no satisfactory means has been developed to allow such large diameter wire to be guided from the wire coil and to the side mounted in-line wire drawing machine. Such large diameter wire cables can be in excess of one-half inch in diameter which necessarily makes the process of bending and contorting the wire to pass through the guides of the machine relatively difficult. If the path which the wire coil must traverse is complex and requires multiple bends in multiple directions, such machines can be difficult to operate, dangerous, and prohibitively expensive. It would therefore be advantageous to provide a wire drawing machine which minimizes space requirements, while allowing the wire to be drawn along its natural cast to maximize ease of operation.